Translation: Grotesque, shoulder, violent … in the superlative degree. They tested my strength and my tolerance. I do not know if it’s autobiographical, if criticism of modern lifestyle or simply the essay a sadistic psychopath.

It is the look of the author in foursomes or what they saw his eyes?

Whatever the answer, read this book takes guts, a strong stomach and detachment.

Translation: I had another book to read in Greek, English a little bored, so I read this outrage. Some few stories were okay, tough, but withstood fine (good is it now?), But some were completely emetic (eg Evidence), and by force of finished. Whatever you do book is emetic, unhealthy, sick, say whatever else you want. Of course the writing is very good. If it was not so sick the author (from what I read in the preface, I did not know from before standards) certainly could write a well written horror novels (even hard). But alas …

Translation: If you get literally is really … horrible! This of course is, in my opinion, the superficial criticism.

Literature, the mysterious writer he had to give things as well as descriptions and images created are literary virtuosity sample. Of course, no one overtakes the sick of meaning.

It is worth to read (if you have a strong stomach) and you will see that literature is better than the “Philosophy in the Boudoir” Marquis and approaches the “Story of the Eye” of Z.Mpataig. Strictly for adult and ormo public!

I came across the writings of Simon Whitechapel a year ago after picking up the first twenty or so issues of Headpress, a 1990s ’zine that dealt with the relentlessly grim, the esoteric and prurient. His style was fascinating, coming across as intelligent and well-read and — at least from first reading — subtly ironic.

In fact he must have impressed some other people during this time too as Headpress’ Critical Vision imprint spun his collected articles together for publication under the title Intense Device: A Journey Through Lust, Murder and the Fires of Hell — they have all the typical interests that run through Whitechapel’s work — there is an obsession with numerology, with Whitehouse-style distortion music, with Hitler and de Sade. There are also articles on farting, on Jack Chick and novelisations of TV shows. They are fascinating, written in a scholarly way with footnotes aplenty but never difficult to understand. He also wrote two non-fiction works during the late 1990s and early 2000s that centred around sadism and the murder of women in South America. They are dark.

There are also the works of fiction. To say that Whitechapel is transgressive is an understatement. His writing bleeds. The ‘official’ work The Slaughter King is filled with the detailed descriptions of sadistic murder, beginning with a serial killer murdering a gay prostitute whilst listening to distortion-atrocity music. The plot is schlocky but serviceable, jumping around inconsistently but the images it creates are terrifying. A bourgeois dinner party straight out of Buñuel and Pasolini’s nightmares where guests are served poisons as if they were the finest consommés: they eat bees until their faces swell, dropping dead at the table, finishing with a trifle “made from the berries of the several varieties of belladonna, of cuckoo-pint, and of the flowers of monkshood”. It’s a sinister book, but nothing compared to his second work.

Whitechapel wrote The Eyes. This is clear just from a simple comparison between his texts, the fascination with language, with sadism, with de Sade. The thing is, The Eyes is supposedly written by some guy called Aldapuerta, Spanish apparently. ‘Aldapuerta’ can be written Alda Puerta — ‘at the gate’, a telling description of these short stories, which go past this point many, many times. The tale of ‘Aldapuerta’ himself is too exact to be believed: a young boy with an interest in de Sade, corrupted by the local pornographer, medical-school training that honed his knowledge, then a mysterious death (echoing shades of Pasolini’s own) and finishing with the “and he might be baaaack” closer. But this point isn’t really an issue and it’s understandable that Whitechapel would want to keep his name away from this work. It is also surrealistically brilliant at times: amongst the brutality, the images it creates are unforgettable.

Of course, Whitechapel is a fake name, redolent of Jack the Ripper, and even Simon was taken from elsewhere — a colleague perhaps? He disappeared during the 2000s, no longer writing for Headpress, a few self-published chapbooks pastiching Clark Ashton Smith… where did he go? There are the rumours of prison time — they are convincing to my mind, as they too revolve around different identities, around extremity and anonymity. I wonder though, if true, just how much this individual actually believed in them. His most recent writings, at his tricksy blog, hint at this, as well as make his ‘relationship’ with Aldapuerta clearer but it’s not in my ability to directly connect the personas.

If you want to be fascinated and repulsed, then the non-author Simon Whitechapel is for you.

As per the opening kayfabe, The Eyes was written by a deceased madman called Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta who fashioned sex-toys from the bones of children.

I don’t want to be the guy who says there’s no Santa Claus, but this wouldn’t be the first time someone ghost-wrote an “alternative” book under the name of an imaginary lunatic. The true author of The Eyes is apt to be alive, sane, and well, and has likely done no more than give himself a backrub with the bones of children, if even that.

But that’s neither here nor there. The Eyes is disgusting, unforgettable, hard to read, harder to stop reading. I have read only a few books like it. One of them is Satanskin by James Havoc, another hoax author. He died in 1999… and was so dead that he reappeared in 2009 and started writing books again. Anyway, like Satanskin, The Eyes contains short stories meant to give you an inside view of hell. Some stories offer but a peek. Others give you the grand tour.

Pedophilia, cannibalism, it’s all here. Some stories (“Armful”) are so ugly that a summary would sound hyperbolic no matter what words I use. Generally, the tales in The Eyes provoke one of two reactions. The first is a horrified “WHAT?!” The second is like what you feel immediately after stepping on a nail. You don’t feel much pain, not at first, but there’s the sense that you’ve done yourself severe trauma.

Aldapuerta is one hell of a writer. James Havoc has a tendency to pile on the purple and overwrite beyond the point of self-parody, but The Eyes is lean and to the point. It’s not without a poetic edge. Aldapuerta’s forte is the quickfire mot juste. “Her hot little leaf of a hand.”… “the pale leaping tongues of his semen”…etc. Neat.

“Ikarus” is the most terrible creation in The Eyes, not a story but a black detonation of horror. A man explores the hull of a B-17 bomber, and discovers something that never will be explained, never could be explained, and never should be explained. “Ikarus” is almost a net liability to the book, as the other stories come up short next to it.

As it nears the end (its end, not yours), The Eyes gets increasingly strange. As the nostalgic schoolmaster’s fantasy of “Upright” ends, “The Winnowing” begins, which largely consists of a Czech man filling out a form. The final sentence… what am I supposed to take from that? That he was being sterilised? The book finishes with “Pornoglossia”, a list of words the author has invented for use in your own Marquis-de-Sade ripoff. The verb “Raí”, for example, means using an empty eye-socket as a sexual orifice. These words are in little danger of making their way into Merriam-Websters’ in the near future.

There may not be a hell, but Aldapuerta (or Whitechapel, or whoever wrote this) have proven that it is possible to create one on the page. The Eyes is genuinely amazing. Hopefully some day Aldapuerta will return to life, pick up his child-femur pen, and write a new collection of stories.

Some more reviews of The Eyes, with commentary by the esteemed Espanish exponent of extremissimity:

I wasn’t half as impressed with this short-story collection as I hoped to be. It’s too well-written to be called bad and too disturbing to be called boring, but of all the stories, only “Ikarus” approaches greatness. The rest begin as vague and confusing messes until they reach that certain moment of horror and atrocity that seem to wake the author up; then they abruptly end. I couldn’t dismiss the impression that Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta himself took no interest whatsoever in anything he wrote here but for those few paragraphs of shocking perversity. It’s not enough to make The Eyes worth reading. Except for “Ikarus.” This story is like all the others until a nameless man crashes a rocket-powered interceptor called a Bachem Ba-349 Natter into a B-17 bomber. From there the story evokes a surreal atmosphere of cosmic horror and unknowableness as the pilot explores the strange bomber, walking its huge cathedral-like fuselage while the airplane “floated kilometers high over a black, unending sea. Far, very far below, almost directly under him, the reflection of an almost full moon lay flat and corroded on smooth water.” Then he finds an alien device torturing a woman to death. If it had all been like this, I would be calling The Eyes brilliant, but none of the other stories reached this level of fascination for me.

This isn’t a bad book, just an exceedingly oversold one. It’s the first and thus far only English-language collection of stories by the late Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta, the so-called “Andalusian de Sade” who specialized in scatological excess. In truth this book’s gross-out quotient is about equal to that found in the writing of better-known practitioners of Sadean literature like James Havoc and Simon Whitechapel, even if the back-cover description proclaims that “to read all the stories of Aldapuerta’s infamous THE EYES is, perhaps in fact, to become mad, or worse” and that “Once read, they will be with you always.”

If the introduction by Lucía Teodora is to be believed, Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta was a petty thief obsessed with pornography who immolated himself (or was murdered) in 1987. THE EYES, originally translated into English by Aldapuerta himself in 1986, is representative of his many unsavory obsessions, and possibly of his actual crimes. The prose, alas, is only intermittently effective, which may have something to do with the translation, or simply the fact that Aldapuerta, who died at age thirty-seven, still had a ways to go before fully hitting his stride as a writer.

The eleven stories collected here all pivot on death and perversion, more often than not in the form of sociopathic individuals who happen upon the aftermath of horrific accidents that inflame those individuals’ psychoses. Particularly representative examples include “Ikarus,” about a Nazi pilot who discovers a woman enclosed in some kind of bizarre torture-machine, “Yin & Yang,” in which a man makes weird patterns with the flesh and organs of some frozen corpses he discovers in a crashed plane, and “Orphea,” featuring a nut who fellates himself with a woman’s severed head.

The most effective of THE EYES’ stories, and the only one that really lives up to the grandiose back-cover claims, is the startling and repellent “Armful.” It’s about an incarcerated pervert who literally devours a little girl he (rather improbably) finds locked up with him. The poetic grotesquerie of the tale is very much in the vein of the aforementioned James Havoc, yet with a verve unique to Mr. Aldapuerta, who was a sick fuck without question but also a (somewhat) talented one.

Take De Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom”, add a dash of George Bataille’s “Madame Edwarda”, “Blue of Noon”, “The Dead Man” and garnish with the ‘grand finale’ of André Pieyre de Mandiargues’ “Portrait of an Englishman in his Château” and you have a rough idea of the bloodsport and delights to be found herein. (Don’t forget your “Lobster Bib” and a Big Grin before you dig in!). Positively ‘lip-smacking’!

[Slightly edited from the original review at Savage Word, author unknown.]

Contemporary Surrealist Classic no. 1

Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta: The Eyes

Right, roll up your sleeves. This is going to get very messy.

You may recall how, when I started this little blog, I made reference to the fact it would contain material of a contentious nature. That I would be going up to my elbows in stuff that dealt with the more extreme ends of human experience, real and imagined. Well, the raw matter I’m about to discuss hails from that area. It’s Serious Drugs. I present the following to you, not as a dare, not as some kind of macho pissing competition, but because I believe that, in the end, it’s worthwhile. (Warning! WOOT! WOOT! Whacking great portions of the following will be N.S.F.W.)

Try this…

“We stopped the ambulance and carried her out of sight of the road, one or two of us sampling her roast flesh, pulling strips of her from her breasts, even before we had laid her to a suitably flat surface. I, uninterested in her as meat, was allowed a minute or two to sample her vagina with my penis. I scalded myself doing it: even internally she was boilingly hot. The congealed fat in my pubes I wouldn’t be entirely free of for more than a day.”

And this…

“I examined her now, laying her slack exhausted frame upon the floor of the cell and running my fingers over her for a place to begin anew. The gaping orifice of anus or vagina seemed a likely point, but my probing fingers could gain no sufficient purchase to begin the tearing out of her flesh. The piece of cement I had used in the breaking-open of her skull was roughly blade shaped. I worked out an edge for it, singing a little to myself to the rhythm of its reiterated rasp against the floor, and used it to begin cutting fillets from her pudenda.”

The first excerpt is from a story called “À La Japonaise”, concerning the paedophilic and necrophiliac exploits of a party of sex-tourist libertines posing as ambulance men in a heavily bombed city. The second comes from “Armful”, in which a paedophile, arrested and imprisoned with the scandalising object of his obsession, rapes, kills and eats her to dispose of the evidence. Both short stories come from a collection called The Eyes, by Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta. It’s not nice, I’m not even sure I recommend it, but it’s lodged itself in my cranium, refuses to leave and I’m interested in why.

Here’s a portion of the back blurb:

“A woman’s severed head renders obscene sexual service beyond death to a blazing, petrol-soaked visionary.
A Nazi rocket-plane rises from the Götterdämmerung of the Third Reich to enter an hyper-oneiric world of sadistic delirium.
An asphyxiated prostitute serves as an embodiment of an entire nation for an insane, necrophiliac American soldier.”

Now bear in mind, I’ve read a lot of stuff not too dissimilar to the above. Like many a pale and interesting young boy I read Burroughs at thirteen and progressed through the tried and tested route: De Sade, Genet, Guyotat, Artaud. Literary descriptions of extreme behaviour are nothing new to me. Like a horror fan whose palate has become jaded after watching one too many exploding heads, I consider myself to be pretty much unshockable, artistically speaking anyway. But there is something about The Eyes, something about its blank-eyed, uncaring malevolence, that scares me shitless. And I think it might be because I recognise something in it. Something scared and sad and not a hundred miles away from human.

From the biography at the beginning of the book, written by its translator, Lucía Teodora, we can glean that Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta was born in Seville in 1950 and died, burned to death, in 1987. The introduction sets out the facts of a life full of perversion and petty criminality. Prison sentences, prostitution, rumours of AIDS and a fascination with human remains and sex tourism are all there. His fatal immolation is rumoured to have been the work of drug dealers; he stole a foreskin from a medical ward and later ate it; he owned a sex aid which he claimed was made from the femur of a child. He sounds like a complete twat, to be honest. A grubby, snickering tosser, but I digress.

He is hinted to be something of a liar, who liked to embolden his stories with outrageous detail. Something he refers to directly in “Armful”:

“That is if I, we, assume that this is not a sexual fantasy having no other existence than in my own imagination, in which case logic need not apply. But assume that it is not a fantasy. You will enjoy it more, assuming thus.”

This strikes me as someone attempting to have his cake and eat it. One can imagine Aldapuerta (if he even existed: to be honest I have my doubts) recounting some horrific tale before justifying himself with a sly “Or did I?” Whatever, it’s a pretty impressive way to implicate your audience, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer-style.

The book is subtitled “Emetic fables from the Andalusian De Sade”, which doesn’t really do it justice. Undoubtedly De Sade is an influence — you can’t deal with sexually deviant libertinage without invoking the old gasbag it seems — but trying to compare it to other De Sade-influenced books is a waste of time. The Eyes is thoroughly modern, having little in common with all those wankathons set in châteaus that regularly squirt out of the underground, like steady drips from a flaccid cock. (I’m not naming any names. Apart from that tedious tosser Jeremy Reed. Do give up, Jezza. There’s a good chap.)

No, there’s none of that God-awful “By-Christ-my-prick-is-hard-I’m-hot-for-this-wench’s-arse-and-no-mistake” dialogue, no swishings of the cat-o’-nine-tails, no tedious pontificating on the nature of morality and, crucially, no stories over twelve pages long. What The Eyes has to say it says quickly. Like a story printed in Penthouse or a scene in a porn film, it does the job and gets the fuck out.

Now, I can tell you that The Eyes reads like pornography (something that I’m sure wasn’t far from Aldapuerta’s mind when he wrote it), but whether it works as pornography I’m afraid I don’t know. You’ll no doubt be pleased to hear that I don’t share any of its characters’ sexual proclivities. I prefer my partners still breathing and above the legal age limit, thanks very much. So if The Eyes is basically the necrophile equivalent of that “Roy Orbison wrapped in cling film” book, why am I drawn to it? Why am I spending a sunny day writing about it and not sipping Chablis on the roof-garden?

Good point. Let’s you and me go further.

In the second story in the collection, “Ikarus”, a WWII pilot flies a Nazi rocket-plane into the hull of a passing B-17 (military accuracy not being the first thing on Aldapuerta’s mind when he wrote it, I’m sure). Inside the bomber he witnesses the evisceration of a young woman strapped into a vividly described torture-device:

“It was a sculpture, a crucifix of broken and jagged spears and sheets of iron and steel and copper stretched between the floor and roof and walls of the fuselage into which had been set — nailed, clamped, impaled, pincered — the body of a woman.”

So far so vile, and when it comes to the description of the woman’s body being torn limb from limb we aren’t spared any details. This is sexually powered transgressive fiction of a particularly nasty stripe. However, if it’s simply meant to function as pornography, then what are the final paragraphs all about?

“Cradling her [head] in two hands, he walked over to the flak hole in the fuselage wall. The moon rode beneath him, a negative pupil in a giant eye of water. He sat down on the edge of the hole, legs dangling over kilometres of emptiness, and waited, dandling the head in his lap like a child, for the impulse to come to push himself and her out and down into the black, unending sea.”

Unlike your average piece of pornography this sustains itself after the moment of orgasm, carrying on to a point of desolation. Whatever the author’s intention, as an image that’s up there with any piece of literary surrealism I can think of. Possessing an authenticity and clarity of vision to rival Magritte or Ernst.

Similarly vivid and surreal images appear at points throughout the book, and it’s those moments that serve to elevate it above mere torture porn. An arctic scavenger rearranges the internal organs of plane-crash victims into occult patterns on the ice flow; a nameless man drives across a nameless desert for a rendezvous with a celebrity car-wreck; a survivor huddles under the wings of a crashed plane, waiting “for wings to sweep out black wounds in the star-cankered flesh of the heavens above him.”

It’s these images, and others, that serve to give The Eyes its sense of timeless melancholy. The aftermath of the sexual acts described nearly always end in isolation, as if the nameless protagonists suddenly become acutely aware of their distance from any kind of society, any kind of love. The emptiness after the orgasm.

In the story “B.V.M.” a torturer recounts his philosophy of pain:

“Even if I were a woman, and could string orgasm on orgasm like beads upon a necklace, in time I should sicken of it. Do you think Messalina, in that competition of hers with a courtesan, knew pleasure as much on the first occasion as the last? Impossible.
“Yet consider.
“Consider pain.
“Give me a cubic centimetre of your flesh and I could give you pain that would swallow you as an ocean swallows a grain of salt. And you would always be ripe for it, from before the time of your birth to the moment of your death. We are always in season for the embrace of pain…”

“Consider,” I said.
“Consider the ways in which we may gain pleasure.
“Consider.
“Consider the ways in which we may be given pain.
“The one is to the other as the moon is to the sun.”

Aldapuerta elevates the acts of agony to a religious level (“I seek only to sacrifice minds. There is no surer way than pain”). The employment of his dry, dispassionate style increases the reader’s revulsion. The prose rings with authenticity. It feels real, experienced. It is this combination of clinical, Ballardian prose with some of the most vivid surrealist imagery I’ve read that keeps me coming back to this book. The carnage depicted seems merely an adjunct, a twisted carnival distraction on the road to nowhere. It’s this feeling of emptiness and futility that serves to give the grotesque erotica its sting.

The Eyes is not a book without antecedents. At various points it reads like Ballard, De Sade, Burroughs, or a combination of all three. Yet I have never read anything quite like it for foul, lingering impression. A hell is being evoked, one all the more scorching because of its prescience. The debauched libertines (or fucked-up perverts, if you prefer) of Aldapuerta’s fictions are all the more believable because rather than being disgraced aristocrats or night-haunting dandies, they are modern men — pilots, emigrés, professionals — wandering through sexual hells of their own jaded designs. Doomed, after that ultimate orgasm, that final detonating fuck, not to follow their victims into oblivion, but to be trapped in lonely wastelands, forever searching for ways to escape. When you finally shut the book you can’t help but feel that it’s the least they deserve.

I hesitate to recommend The Eyes. This kind of book demands more than a simple “Like that? Try this!” However, I will say that in strength of imagery, surrealistic clarity and visionary brutality it’s up there with the best post-second-world-war underground fiction, worthy of comparisons with Ballard, Burroughs and David Britton. Praise doesn’t come much higher, nor has it ever come with more provisos. Those with strong stomachs, by all means take a swig. Just don’t blame me if you end up being sick over yourselves.

[Slightly edited from the original review at Savage Word, author unknown.]

Towards a New Surrealism

Recently, while gazing from the roof terrace of my London bachelor pad, I’ve been giving some thought to the idea of canons. No, not the aggressively noisy things that men in spangly suits and crash helmets are occasionally fired from, but rather those boring lists of books, films and what-have-you that get trotted out semi-regularly in an attempt to uncover what really are the best, most exemplary, seminal (urgh) works in a particular field. Now everyone hates it when the usual Oxbridge tossers are asked for theirs and we end up with the usual round of Miltons, Blakes, Orwells and Shakespeares, but it struck me that we dwellers in the dank passes have our canon as well. It goes a little like this: Burroughs, Ballard, Bataille, Artaud, Dick, Bukowski, Genet, etc. All good stuff, undoubtedly but a little tired now, especially when such good work is still continuing on the margins.

Now all this talk of canons made me think of the Surrealists. In an issue of one of their periodicals, André Breton listed a series of books that were crucial influences on the movement. It included Lautréamont, Jarry, Roussell and a host of others that had provided the initial spark that began the great revolution. As someone who thinks that a vital new strand of Surrealism is long overdue in today’s culture I thought it might be fun to begin to compile a similar list. You can see the first fruits of this search for new beginnings above. I will add more as and when they reveal themselves to me. Hope you enjoy.